Blanked: A Tale of Two Books
A significant feature of the propaganda system is the suppression of clearly important, credible books which are nevertheless deemed unfit for review in the ‘respectable mainstream’.
In 2025, two important – indeed, groundbreaking – bestselling books about British politics were published which were almost entirely ignored by the state-corporate media. These were The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy by Paul Holden and Complicit: Britain’s role in the destruction of Gaza by Peter Oborne, both published by OR Books.
What follows is not a full-blown review of both books. But we will summarise crucial aspects of each, indicating why it suits the interests of established power, including the major national media, to ignore the forensic analysis and damning conclusions provided by the authors.
The Fraud
Consider, first, The Fraud by Paul Holden. Holden is a Network Fellow at the Safra Centre for Ethics at Harvard University with over a decade of experience in investigating cases of grand corruption and corporate malfeasance, focusing on the arms trade. He was a senior researcher on the book and feature documentary, Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade by Andrew Feinstein. Holden has published six books, three of them bestsellers in his native South Africa. He has written for both the Guardian and the Independent.
The Fraud, published in November 2025, is a damning account of Sir Keir Starmer’s rise to power in the Labour Party, becoming leader in April 2020 and then Prime Minister in July 2024 after that month’s General Election. Holden’s analysis is based on access to a substantial, previously unseen leak of internal Labour Party documents.
Much of Holden’s book focuses on Morgan McSweeney, currently Starmer’s chief of staff and instrumental in Starmer’s ascent to 10 Downing Street. In October 2023, The Times stated that:
‘nobody without elected office wields as much power in British politics as McSweeney’.
He is, said the Times, ‘the real power behind Starmer – who would rather stay in the shadows’.
Holden has now exposed McSweeney’s role ‘in the shadows’. Between 2017 and 2020, McSweeney was head of the innocuous-sounding Labour Together, a think tank which ostensibly worked to unify the various factions of Labour – left, centre and right – to defeat the Conservatives and form a new government.
In reality, Labour Together oversaw a secretive operation to destroy the left-wing Jeremy Corbyn and his allies, fuelling the moral panic of an ‘antisemitism crisis’ to do so. The aim was to replace Corbyn with Starmer. The operation was funded by donations totalling nearly £740,000. The two largest funders were hedge fund manager Martin Taylor and Sir Trevor Chinn, a former funder of Tony Blair as MP.
Taylor’s hedge fund, Crake Asset Management, has held significant investments in major US private healthcare corporations, including HCA Healthcare and United Health. In November 2024, the Ferret, an investigative website based in Scotland, reported that:
‘quarterly US filings, released this month, reveal that Crake Asset Management has bought shares worth more than £8m in HCA Healthcare since July.
‘HCA Healthcare claims to be the largest private healthcare provider in the world and “one of the leading private healthcare providers in the UK”.’
Since the 1980s, Chinn has funded both Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel. He also sits on the executive committee of the Jewish Leadership Council and the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, both heavily-involved in pro-Israel advocacy. Chinn reportedly ‘had great concerns about the election of an outspoken opponent of the Jewish state as Labour leader.’
Donations to Labour Together were not declared in a timely fashion by McSweeney to the Electoral Commission, as required by law. That only happened much later. The Commission then imposed a rather paltry fine of £14,250, seemingly accepting that McSweeney’s omission was accidental. Holden argues convincingly from the internal Labour record that that is unlikely and that McSweeney may well have ‘purposely broken the law’ to evade scrutiny of Labour Together’s operations. The journalist describes in some detail communications between McSweeney and the Commission in which the Labour campaigner argues that he is not required to report the donations and he is told, in no uncertain terms, that he is legally obliged to do so.
Holden states that McSweeney:
‘used those undisclosed funds to propel Sir Keir Starmer to the leadership of the Labour Party, transforming both the party and British politics’.
He adds:
‘In investigating how McSweeney and his allies have transformed the Labour Party, I have come across evidence pointing to serious wrongdoing over an extended period, some of which I believe requires further investigation by regulatory agencies and law enforcement. Indeed, I have come to the opinion that the political project that delivered us a Starmer government has been a reckless and arguably lawless endeavour whose misconduct threatens the health of British democracy.’
(The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy, Paul Holden, OR Books, 2025, p. xvi)
Some of the undisclosed money was used to set up astroturf groups such as Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). Astroturfing means that a false impression is given of a grassroots campaign when, in fact, it has been created or run by undisclosed corporate or political backers. One of SFFN’s targets was The Canary, a left-wing, Corbyn-supporting website that regularly attracted 8.5 million hits a month.
Holden notes in his book:
‘Whereas most media outlets, and especially The Guardian, did not interrogate Starmer’s background, or else covered stories with a pro-Starmer slant, The Canary took the opposite approach. Indeed, during the period between January and April 2020, The Canary was the only media outlet in the country to interrogate Starmer’s professional history from a critical perspective and use this to contextualise his leadership pitch.’ (p. 158)
Meanwhile, SFFN mounted a campaign against The Canary:
‘to deprive it of advertising income and, perhaps even more importantly, create the impression that it was a fringe outpost of cranks and nutjobs.’
One important method of attack was to portray The Canary as a purveyor of supposedly antisemitic content. The campaign worked. The loss of advertising revenue was so severe that it forced the website to fundamentally change its business model. It had to shift to rely almost entirely on reader-funded subscriptions to survive.
The Canary was later cleared of ‘hate speech’ by the independent regulator Impress, but the outlet had already been badly damaged. The website ‘went down from 22 staff to one member of staff within a few months of us targeting it,’ boasted Imran Ahmed who ran SFFN, and who worked closely with McSweeney in Labour Together.
McSweeney directed the campaign to elect Starmer as head of the Labour Party during the leadership campaign between January and April 2020. Holden refers to the ruthless McSweeney-led operation to shift Labour to the right under Starmer as ‘the Starmer Project’. Under the Starmer Project, Holden details how McSweeney and his allies were able to take control of Labour’s bureaucracy, ditching left-leaning policies, rigging the candidate selection process to install Starmer loyalists, and even purging the party of left-wing members for alleged antisemitism, many of them Jewish.
Holden also examines Starmer’s stalwart support for Israel:
‘Under Starmer’s leadership the party defended Israel’s criminal destruction of Gaza, despite overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces were targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure and notwithstanding a torrent of brazenly genocidal rhetoric from the most senior Israeli officials on down.’ (p. 14)
He continues:
‘To acquiesce in or enable so grave a breach of international law was bad enough. But Starmer also flouted British parliamentary convention to water down a Gaza ceasefire initiative in February 2024. This marked the first time that the Starmer Project’s undemocratic and opportunistic political mode – previously confined to purging internal party dissent – was applied to the country at large.’ (p. 14)
Richard Sanders, the experienced journalist and filmmaker who made Al Jazeera’s landmark Labour Files series three years ago, noted recently that the documentaries:
‘laid bare the ruthlessness, racism and maniacal factionalism of the Labour right and its cynical exploitation of the antisemitism issue to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.’
The Labour Files series was ‘resolutely ignored by the British media’, Sanders correctly observed, as we also reported in a media alert at the time.
In his review of Holden’s book, Sanders wrote that The Fraud confirms and indeed amplifies the analysis and conclusions of the Labour Files. Sanders concluded that the book:
‘offers the most damning portrayal yet of a political project at once proudly Machiavellian but entirely devoid of moral and intellectual substance.’
It should come as no surprise, then, that not a single review of The Fraud has appeared in a major UK newspaper; an issue to which we will return below.
Complicit
Regular readers of our alerts will be familiar with Peter Oborne. He is an associate editor of Middle East Eye and a columnist for Byline Times and Declassified UK. He has worked as chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph, political editor of the Spectator, a political commentator at the Daily Express, and as a journalist at the Evening Standard. He has also made nearly 30 documentaries for Channel 4, BBC World and BBC Radio 4. Oborne is the author of numerous books including Sunday Times bestsellers, The Assault on Truth and The Fate of Abraham: Why the West Is Wrong about Islam. His most recent book, Complicit: Britain’s role in the destruction of Gaza, may well be his bravest and most important work to date.
Oborne summed up the powerful themes of his book early on:
‘A full reckoning with Britain’s culpability for the destruction of Gaza requires an assessment of the failing institutions that misgovern British public life: the dishonesty of the media, the moral bankruptcy of the foreign policy establishment, growing domestic authoritarianism, the corruption of parliament, and the collapse of a party system increasingly manipulated by special interests and the super-rich.’
(Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza, Peter Oborne, OR Books, 2025, p. 10)
Oborne reminded readers of Starmer’s notorious LBC radio interview on 11 October 2023 where the Labour leader declared that ‘Israel does have that right’ when questioned about Israel’s withholding of power and water from Gaza. Labour shadow ministers Emily Thornberry and David Lammy held Starmer’s line during subsequent TV appearances where they refused to say that the Israeli blockade was a violation of international law. Nine days later, Starmer then attempted to gaslight the British public by claiming he had never said what he had been recorded saying.
In January 2024, South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice led to the ruling that there was a ‘plausible’ risk that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. The Tory government then in power, and the Labour government which followed, were thus legally obliged to take measures to prevent genocide from happening. To their eternal shame, and possible future prosecution given the Genocide Convention’s incorporation into domestic law, British ministers did not do so.
Oborne was particularly damning about Starmer:
‘As genocide raged, he had not made any meaningful attempt to stop it. He had not imposed any serious consequences on Israel. He had not put any pressure on the US. He had not committed to enforce international law. He had not condemned clear Israeli crimes and he had struggled to speak about Palestinians as if they were members of the human race.’ (p. 168)
Oborne also skewered the state-corporate media:
‘Large sections of the media repeated the lies promoted by Israeli and British politicians. Some produced fresh lies of their own. They twisted their reports in favour of the Israeli cause. For a long time, reports of Israeli atrocities appeared either in muted form or not at all. Hamas atrocities were exaggerated or fabricated. Dissident voices were suppressed. Across much of the media spectrum a general implicit consensus emerged: Israelis count and Palestinians don’t.’ (p. 35)
He cited the important, detailed study of the BBC’s Gaza coverage during the first twelve months of the genocide by the Centre for Media Monitoring, published in July 2025 (see also our media alert here).
The study showed that the corporation operated a form of apartheid with two sets of rules: one for Palestinians and another for Israelis. The BBC employed the word ‘massacre’ almost eighteen times more often in relation to Israeli than to Palestinian victims, and never used the term in headlines about Israeli atrocities. The term ‘butcher’ was used 220 times for actions against Israelis, but just once for actions against Palestinians.
The average Israeli death received thirty-three times more coverage across BBC articles, and nineteen times more across TV and radio, than the average Palestinian death. ‘Israeli deaths were reported in more emotive terms’, Oborne observed, ‘with victims far more likely to be humanised by details about their names, family background, jobs, and lives.’
Relevant history was routinely airbrushed out of BBC news coverage. There was barely any mention of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory: in July 2024, the ICJ had ruled that Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip (despite the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli forces), is unlawful under international law.
Nor was there significant attention given by the BBC to explaining that the majority of Gaza’s inhabitants are refugees from the 1948 expulsion, when the state of Israel was established, or their descendants: the Nakba (an Arabic term that means ‘catastrophe’ or ‘disaster’) was barely mentioned.
In the BBC’s reporting of the events of 7 October 2023, they barely covered the Israeli military’s ‘Hannibal Directive’. Oborne wrote:
‘The directive licenced the killing of Israeli citizens and soldiers, often by Apache helicopter fire, rather than allowing them to be captured. Its application has been documented by the United Nations and well reported in the Israeli press, including a major investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, but ignored by the BBC.’ (pp. 49-50)
Oborne described this as ‘a shocking omission’ (see also our media alert here). He noted that, except for one passing mention, the BBC did not report on Israel’s notorious ‘Dahiya doctrine’ implemented by its military forces. He continued:
‘This BBC failure is negligent because Israel’s destruction of Gaza cannot be understood without knowing that Israel’s established military doctrine licenses the indiscriminate obliteration of civilian infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, and universities. As with the Hannibal Directive, the subject has been covered seriously in the Israeli press. That the BBC did not explain the Dahiya doctrine to its audience was a consequential reporting failure. It is hard to believe that it was not deliberate.’ (p. 50)
The list of BBC omissions, as well as those of the rest of the major news media, just kept piling up. There was virtually zero mention of the copious evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent presented by South Africa to the ICJ:
‘Incredibly the BBC seems never to have reported Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s references to “Amalek”, seen by many as the invocation of a divine command to annihilate an enemy nation, until Jeremy Bowen briefly mentioned it in an article in June 2025.’
Moreover, on more than a hundred occasions BBC presenters shut down any mention of genocide by BBC interviewees.
Meanwhile state authoritarianism is on the rise, with peaceful protesters criminalised and demonised. At root, Oborne warns that the very foundations of democracy and the rule of law are being seriously eroded by a corrupt and morally depraved political and media system:
‘British journalists and politicians, acting in a de facto alliance with the far right, have painted the marchers as supporters of terrorism and enemies of civilisation—for having the audacity to march against the livestreamed slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.’ (p. 246)
He added:
‘In support of Israel, British politicians, backed by mainstream media, have given the green light to mass murder, assassination, torture, law-breaking, and chaos. In the process they have repudiated the international legal order that Britain herself helped establish to prevent a repetition of the horrors of World War Two.’ (p. 246)
In fact, argued Oborne, the marchers and protesters are ‘supporting a global moral order that is under attack’. They:
‘profoundly represent British values as these have traditionally been understood: belief in fairness, tolerance, the rule of law. Standing up for the underdog. Compassion, kindness, a sense of civic responsibility and what George Orwell called decency. A belief in community, solidarity, and human rights, and a conviction that we owe a duty not just to ourselves and our own communities but to all human beings.’ (p. 246)
Oborne ends his book with a long list of establishment figures that he damns for their complicity in the Gaza genocide, including: government ministers, not least Starmer and Rishi Sunak, his predecessor; arms manufacturers; the leaders of the British armed forces; ‘the moral cowards at the top of the BBC’; newspaper owners, editors and journalists; the Archbishop of Canterbury; the extreme right, including Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson; pro-Israel lobbyists; and more.
‘Damn all who were complicit in this brazen, public, and protracted crime against humanity.
‘I expect you all think you will get away with it. You have in the past. But the world may be starting to change.’
Zero ‘MSM’ Reviews
‘Complicit’ is compelling, detailed and written in clear, concise prose. It would be hard to conceive of a book this year, or any other year, that more deserves to be brought to the attention of the British public. Written by an experienced journalist and documentary-maker with a long career in the British media, Complicit should have kickstarted a much-needed national debate about the extent of UK complicity in the Gaza genocide and, indeed, the state of British democracy. But to do so, of course, would require the state-corporate media and the political system itself to examine their own dishonourable roles in the destruction of Gaza, the degradation of British democracy and the erosion of international law. That was never going to happen.
According to the AI tool Ask Gemini, Complicit was one of the highest-selling books across the UK in its category, likely achieving a #1 rank in the ‘British Politics’ or related category on Amazon UK during its peak. Indeed, propelled to prominence by social media, ‘alternative’ outlets such as Declassified UK, and word of mouth, it appeared on the prestigious Sunday Times bestseller list. And yet, according to our database and online searches, it has never been reviewed in a major British newspaper; ironically, not even in the Sunday Times which printed its bestseller list every week.
The small-circulation Morning Star, however, published an insightful and glowing review by Gavin O’Toole, who wrote:
‘The most disturbing conclusion to be drawn from Peter Oborne’s forensic examination of Britain’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction is that its support for Israel has torn the very fabric of our democracy. This comes across on every page of what will surely become a go-to work of reference about the moral nadir to which our governing elite has sunk in a long history of British hypocrisy.’
This conclusion is clearly too dangerous to be broached and disseminated by the state-corporate media, BBC News very much included. A rare exception was an interview with Oborne on BBC Radio Ulster and also on Channel 4 News where Oborne, along with Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former UK ambassador to Yemen, was interviewed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy. Iain Dale hosted an LBC radio programme last month on the future of Palestine with Oborne and former BBC reporter and presenter Jonathan Dimbleby.
For such a vitally important book, that is a disgracefully low level of coverage in ‘the mainstream’. But par for the course, for the reasons given above.
As for Paul Holden’s The Fraud, his investigation of Labour Together’s undisclosed donations was reported by right-wing, Conservative-supporting newspapers, the Telegraph and The Sunday Times. Clearly, it was done for self-serving, partisan reasons in an attempt to topple Starmer and aid the return to power of a Tory party in disarray.
However, they did not cover the broader and deeper issues of how the money was used; namely, to depose Corbyn and install Starmer, deploying fake astroturf campaigns and the cynical exploitation of Labour’s ‘antisemitism crisis’ to move the party further to the right. Nor did those right-wing papers address the infamous ditching by Starmer of the ten ‘pledges’ in his Labour party leadership campaign which he – or, in other words, Morgan McSweeney – had made in a cynical attempt to portray himself as a kind of ‘Corbyn continuation’ candidate.
Moreover, neither paper actually reviewed the book nor examined its wide-ranging analysis based on copious evidence about the McSweeney-led ditching of left-wing policies, candidates and members; Starmer’s unswerving support for Israel in its Gaza genocide; or the book’s damning conclusions about the state of British politics and indeed democracy. According to our searches, the only British newspaper to review ‘The Fraud’ was, once again, the Morning Star, which praised Holden’s comprehensive account of the Prime Minister’s ‘track record of duplicity and betrayal’.
This effective media silence is remarkable, given the highly detailed investigative work outlined at length in the book and the major conclusions reached by Holden. Moreover, ‘The Fraud’ clearly had huge appeal for the public as it was a bestseller among books on UK politics and current events. Again, according to the AI tool Ask Gemini, the book attained ‘very high bestseller rank’ on the Amazon UK chart, reaching number 1 in the ‘British Politics’ and ‘Political Corruption’ categories. But, as with Oborne’s book Complicity, the contents are too hot for the ‘mainstream’ media to handle.
Postscript
Although the Guardian has never published a review of The Fraud, the paper’s political editor, Pippa Crerar, did email Holden in February 2024 to say that the paper was about to publish an article about him. The piece, Holden discovered, would claim that he was under police investigation for receiving illegally hacked documents. The claim would, Holden feared:
‘significantly damage, if not destroy, my professional reputation’.
He was given a deadline of less than fourteen hours to respond. But the claim was false and Holden could prove it. After consulting his lawyer, he wrote to Crerar threatening legal action if the Guardian went ahead with its false story. They never did.
Holden later discovered that Labour Together had raised ‘concerns’ about him to the British security services and had likely fed this information to the Guardian. This was around the same time that the Telegraph was asking questions about Labour Together’s undisclosed money, based on evidence Holden had provided.
Labour Together had even hired a consultancy firm to dig for dirt on both Holden and Andrew Feinstein, who had set up Shadow World Investigations together in 2019. This is a London-based, non-governmental organisation that conducts research on the arms trade. Feinstein was also politically active in Starmer’s Holborn and St Pancras constituency, and would later run against the Labour leader in the 2024 General Election.
One can only look on in awe at how this never became a national scandal, with no banner newspaper headlines or coverage on BBC News at Ten. The power of propaganda by omission is truly a wonder to behold.
In early December, the Guardian published a piece titled, ‘The best history and politics books of 2025’. Needless to say, neither Complicit nor The Fraud were included. Credit to those Guardian readers, however, who managed to insert admiring mentions into the space for online comments below the article.
